In the field of wireless communication, a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) may include one or more wireless stations communicating with one or more wireless terminals such as Access Points (APs). Wireless communication may be performed in accordance with suitable standards, for example, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards 802.11, 802.11a, 802.11b, or 802.11g.
Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) devices that conform to the IEEE standard 802.11g, support both Complimentary Code Keying (CCK) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation schemes to transmit packet preamble/heading and packet payload, respectively. WLAN devices of this type, e.g., modems, may use a physical layer (PHY) controller to execute operations defined by a Finite State Machine (FSM). The PHY controller may be implemented in hardware (HW) and/or software (SW) and may be control the physical activation of receiver/transmitter components of the WLAN device to perform certain transmission and reception functions.
Some PHY controllers have an autodetection mode to determine whether an incoming signal is modulated in the CCK or the OFDM modulation schemes. In the auto-detection mode, both CCK and OFDM receiving components may be active and the PHY controller repeatedly detects the modulation type as part of the packet reception process for each incoming frame. This repeated detection may consume unnecessary power and may degrade the performance of the WLAN device.
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